Leicester Tigers have moved on from the issues they faced at the start of the season, says scrum-half Ben Youngs.

Tigers lost their opening brace of Premiership games but have hit back to win four on the bounce. And though they narrowly lost their first match of the European Cup campaign against Racing 92 in Paris last week, the performance was a significant improvement on the awayday blues they suffered last term.

Now they set about putting a first European win on the board as they host Castres on Saturday evening and Youngs believes Tigers are where they "need to be.”

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He said: “I think we all felt at the beginning of the season that with the amount of changes we’d had and Matt O’Connor coming in – he came at the back end of last season though he wasn’t able to influence how we did things too much – there was always going to be a little bit of teething problems, I suppose.

“But we are way beyond that now and we are right where we need to be.

“We probably just need to understand in the big games and Europe how important the small margins are and I felt we probably didn’t manage those moments well enough (against Racing).”

Try time for Ben Youngs as Tigers get the better of Gloucester. Picture - Getty Images

So Leicester know that while there were plenty of good things to come from the match in Paris, other areas have to be sharpened up.

“We want to make sure that our line speed goes up again,” the England scrum-half said. “We want to make sure our tackle completion rate is higher than it was at the weekend and it is vitally important that we keep Castres in the areas that we need to. We don’t want to give them easy field position to allow them to drive at us and run at us.

“We saw at Racing that all the French teams have big bodies and ultimately that takes its toll towards the end of the game when they keep running into you. So we really have to manage that middle third quite well.”

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Youngs points to men of the quality of Steve Mafi, Maama Vaipulu and David Smith as potential “game-breakers” in the visitors line-up. And he doesn’t expect Castres to be fazed by visiting Welford Road.

“We have a great record and I’m sure the crowd will be out in numbers,” he said. “But if I was them I’d only be looking forward to it, so I’m sure they are doing the same.

“We are certainly looking forward to getting our European campaign at home underway. We want to tidy up a few things from last weekend. To come away with a result would be great and there won’t be much between the sides after two rounds.”